1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention is in the field of data processing systems and, more particularly, in the field of power consumption in a data processing system.
2. History of Related Art
Power consumption is an increasingly important concern for manufacturers and users of data processing systems. Efforts to reduce power consumption have traditionally emphasized hardware design. One may reasonably assume, however, that the manner in which the system executes software has some effect on power consumption. For example, in a multitasking environment where multiple software threads are executing concurrently, it likely that the energy consumption attributable to the execution of any individual thread is a function of the code contained in the thread. In other words, the energy consumption attributable to one thread is most likely different than the energy consumption attributable to another thread.
Under the hypothesis that energy consumption is thread-dependent, it would be desirable to have accurate information indicating the amount of energy attributable to each thread. With this information, one could then focus software-based energy conservation efforts on the worst-case threads. Unfortunately, accurate information regarding the amount of energy attributable to software threads is not generally available. It would be desirable, therefore, to implement a system and method for measuring the amount of energy attributable to each thread executing in a multitasking environment.